Abram received his call in Chapter 12. I doubt if it was an overnight
thing. God rarely works like that. Over time it became clear to him that God
was leading him out of his culture.
To Abram He made a very clear
future commitment as in “I will” – it is not yet sealed. He adds:
- I will make of you a great nation. I will bless you and make your name great – that defied his age, 75, and the barrenness of his wife, so it revealed a pain that only God knew;
- You will be a blessing. I will bless all who bless you, and curse all who curse you – it promised a place of value, not things of value. Jacob also found that to be of surpassing value.
- In you shall all families of the earth be blessed - that extended his legacy through Christ to all of us. It marks a cornerstone in Paul’s treatise on grace.
Its concise and to the point, so characteristic of a divine sovereign.
Every encounter with God that I have witnessed spoke a world of meaning in the
fewest of words – often less than five. My personal experience of that has been
that I knew what He was saying because of my past.
Abram took his dead brother’s son with him, revealing his honor. In
chapter 11:28-31, we read that Abram had already departed the Ur of the
Chaldees together with his father, Terah, his brother Nahor and Lot, the son of
his dead second-brother, Haran.
That marked the end of their association with the moon god of Ur, which
was worshipped in the still-standing Ziggurat of Ur. To God it was critical
that they uproot from that culture, because the two worldviews could never be
reconciled. Paganism was from Cain, Theism from Seth.
They moved northwards to Haran and settled there until God called Abram
to follow Him to the land of Canaan. Having followed the Euphrates through
modern-day Iraq, they ended up in northern Syria and then went south, parallel to
the Mediterranean, into Canaan.
He pitched his tent at Bethel, which became a vital touchstone for
Jacob. It means “house of God”. To the east of it lay Hai, “the house of ruins”.
The pagans had tried to coopt the Great God, just as Cain had tried to
find the formula for securing divine favor. That folly resurfaced not long
after the flood, in the form of Babel: the real ruin that lay to the west of
Abram’s tent.
By confusing their languages, and only by that, God destroyed their
enterprise in one fell swoop, to frustrate a dark mystery that has always
sought to gain divine favor for its own undertakings or, if need be, to
enthrone the Devil and turn their backs on God.
On entering the land via the plains of Moreh, God gave the land of
Canaan to Abram and his descendants. However, drought forced him to journey on
to Egypt. It’s a subtle reminder that the land God was giving him would always
be a barren woman, yet so fruitful.
Abram grew in stature. The age of the patriarchs began.
To demonstrate his humanity and the distinction between the righteousness
bestowed by God in response to faith and conscience-based religions that major
on do’s and don’ts, God pulls back the curtain just enough for us to witness Abram’s
denial of his wife.
He was scared, which was human enough, and he knew she was very
desirable. So he passed her off as his sister, to avoid being killed by
Pharaoh. God had the last say. Pharaoh never touched her but he did learn to
respect Abram and his God.
Their time in Egypt was a mirror of a time yet to come. It was an
incubator for his fledgling realm. The protection of Pharaoh allowed them to
flourish, yet kept them from assimilating the Egyptian culture. As such, they
returned to the touchstone of Bethel, as did Jacob.
They had become very wealthy with great herds, but conflict between the
herdsmen of Abram and Lot forced a rift. The land could not hold both. So Abram
let Lot choose where to settle. He opted for the “lowlands” of Sodom and Gomorrah
because the valleys were fertile.
He settled beneath the oaks of Mamre
on the arid plains of Hebron
From that moment, Lot’s chosen land is under sentence of death. Even the
name says it. Sodom means “burnt” and Gomorrah means, “heap”. It was as
treacherous as Eden and as doomed to fail, because of the wickedness of the Sodomites.
However, to Abram, God says, “wherever you set your feet is yours.” He marked
out an extensive area, but history cut that down – Exodus 23:21 marks the
borders as: the sea to east, the Jordan to the west, the Red Sea (Sharm el Sheik) and the Euphrates in Syria.
A war erupted in Canaan
The kings of that region were seeking to assert territorial claims, in
the pre-genesis of nations. The city states needed to coalesce into substantive
nations and the war revealed the tensions behind that. From that would emerge Babylon
and Persia.
The tensions are an overflow from Babel where the foundations of
“mystery Babylon the great” were laid, that sinister force that will ultimately
pursue a global, pagan autocracy.
The war would mark a shift in balances and the assimilation of smaller
realms into nations. For all its problems, the rise of nations ordered the
advancement of humanity.
Four of the kings managed to drive the kings of Sodom and Gomorrah into the
slime pits of Siddim. The victors took Lot. Abram then had to intervene.
With his own household “army” of “trained” servants, he used a pincer
movement to cut down the kings and destroy them, which helped to tilt the power
balances further. He recovered Lot, but Sodom, having been thus spared by
Abram’s action tried to claim the souls that were once his, in return for all
the material plunder. Abram declined.
The king of Salem, Melchizedek
It could have been Jesus, probably was. Certainly Hebrews names Jesus as
a priest of the same order, for neither had a beginning or end of days.
Abram intuitively cedes a tenth of his spoils to the priest after which
Jerusalem was later named.
However, Sodom lives up to his evil reputation by bargaining for the “young
men”. Abram refuses to so much as take a thread from a shoelace from Sodom.
The stage is set for great things. Abram is a great man already, but by
then he had also sorted out who was greater and to that throne alone he bent
his righteous knee.
(c) Peter Missing at Bethelstone.com
